On March 28, 1837, Mendelssohn married Cecile Jeanrenaud. The marriage was happy, and the descendants of Felix Mendels sohn are at the present day numerous and widely dispersed, but united in a great tradition of musical and general culture. The year 1840 is the date of the Lobgesang, and of the erection (mainly at Mendelssohn's expense) of a monument to Bach at Leipzig.
In 1841 the king of Prussia called Mendelssohn to Berlin, with the title of Kapellmeister. This resulted in the composition of choruses and incidental music to Antigone, Oedipus Coloneus, Racine's Athalie, and the rest of the Midsummer Night's Dream music. But Mendelssohn flatly refused to write music for the Eumenides as well, and found his Prussian appointment nothing but a vexation and a strain. He continued his direction of the Gewandhaus concerts, and his visits to England, where he con ducted his Scottish symphony and dedicated it to Queen Victoria, with whom and with the Prince Consort he spent some hours which gave great pleasure to all three. In 1843 he founded the great conservatoire of Leipzig. In Sept. 1844 he induced the king to reduce his Berlin duties to something manageable with less detriment to his wider activities. He introduced Jenny Lind (q.v.1 to the Gewandhaus concerts in 1845, and finished Elijah in 1846, conducting its first performance at the Birmingham festival on Aug. 16.
Its triumph was the culminating point of his life. The spirit of service was making him wear out his constitution. In May 1847 the news of his sister Fanny's death was told him abruptly. He lost consciousness at the shock and never recovered his health. In June a journey by easy stages to Interlaken refreshed him, and when he returned to Leipzig in September he had written some numbers of an oratorio, Christus, and of an opera, Loreley, be sides a remarkable string quartet in F minor (with an astonish ingly powerful second movement) and two movements (Andante and Scherzo) of another quartet. On Sept. 9, a sudden seizure prostrated him. He died on Nov. 4, 38 years of age.
The death of Mendelssohn was, perhaps, one of the most in opportune events in musical history; inopportune for his reputa tion as soon as the period of funeral oratory was past; disastrous for many musicians who hoped to learn from him ; and doubly 'inopportune as making it impossible for him and the pioneers of new musical developments to learn from each other. So docile a nature as Mendelssohn's would surely have learnt in time that Wagner, of whom he knew nothing later than Tannhauser, and Brahms, whom he did not know at all, were opening up worlds beyond the fairyland of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Judaism of Elijah. It is unlikely that Mendelssohn would have
tolerated Wagner's erotic vein; but he would soon have seen the reality of Wagner's new sense of movement, and would have ex perimented with it. And Mendelssohn's experiments were apt to succeed in the long run; his pianoforte concertos led to that violin concerto which has ever since been the model for almost all con certos not on classical lines (see CONCERTO) the ill-fated Refor mation symphony of 1832 proved capable of revival when it was published posthumously; and the thoroughly experimental Lieder ohne Worte were a tremendous success from the first set in 1832 to the last posthumous gleanings from the waste-basket.
Very different is the estimate grounded on the Hebrides over ture, the whole Midsummer Night's Dream music, the Italian symphony, the violin concerto, most of the Scotch symphony, a selection of movements from his chamber-music and a large anthology from his smaller works. The range of this selection is not confined to fairyland. Its deeper notes are human. The weaknesses are those of an artist who must write constantly if he is to write at all; and the emotional inadequacies do not show the character of the man.
More serious is the sentimentality of Mendelssohn's efforts at a religious style. The opening of the Andante religioso in the Lobgesang is the origin of almost all that is sickly in English church music, and Elijah contains things hardly better. But there are many noble features in Elijah: and the introductory recitative with the overture and first chorus form a fine scheme, much of the point of which is lost by the English translator, whose rever ence for the Authorized Version has made him destroy the rhythm of Ich sage es denn which pervades the overture. The scene of the earthquake, the fire and the still small voice is treated by Mendelssohn in a style that justifies the attempt, and the quiet chorus He that shall endure to the end raises Mendelssohn's most reckless prettiness to the height of great music, which choral societies do not seem to appreciate when they omit it and insist on retaining 0 rest in the Lord, which Mendelssohn wished to cut out, and which is in any case sung by Jezebel to save the expense of a second alto. (D. F. T.)